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It’s been 30 years since Vancouver gallery owner Frans Wynans had a flash of inspiration, pulled some strings with his connections in New York and arranged for 22-year-old hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky to spend an afternoon with Andy Warhol — posing for a portrait at the Manhattan studio of the American pop-art icon.

The sun hangs heavy in the sky and the throngs of pedestrians on the street are making progress difficult. But it’s just another day in the life of Shawn Conner, amateur detective. Or is it? Because usually on a summer Thursday afternoon around this time I would be thinking about calling it a day not with some P. I. ing, but with an IPA.

Carol Christie was only 18 when she was chided, drugged and manipulated by her mother into becoming the fourth wife and one of three “church wives” to the prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ Restored.

I first met him in 1981 when I was assigned to write a long feature on him. He was then leader of the separatist Western Canada Concept party, and he was doing all he could to devolve Confederation. The long list of odious clients he would represent in court — the anti-Semites, the white supremacists, the Holocaust deniers — were still off in the future. His office was in Victoria. I thought the cab driver had made a mistake when we drove up to it. It was a former jeweller’s shop that couldn’t rightfully be called a building: it was smaller than a squash court. It was clad in a rough white stucco that gave it the look of something you might see in a Flintstone’s theme park. The cab driver laughed when he saw it. Across the street was a sleek building housing several corporate law firms, but his office was off by itself, in stark relief, at the edge of a parking lot. Even then, Doug Christie stood apart.

You can call me Chan, said my steward just after the whistle announced the final 'all aboard.' Even the whistle sound is unique, deep and resonating, a trusting comfy sound like that of a foghorn or a wise grandfather.

A Victoria lawyer who has earned a reputation among some as a fearless defender of free speech and others as an apologist for hate criminals is dying. Doug Christie, 66, has been admitted to Royal Jubilee Hospital.

In 1998 and 2006, two groups of investors quietly acquired and donated to the Museum of Vancouver 18 sculptures that some authorities believed were created by Michelangelo. The sculptures – details of legs, arms, shoulders and torsos - are made of clay and stand only 10 to 27 centimetres high. Some were identified as working models for Michelangelo’s larger creations, which suggested they were created by the master himself.

A mysterious and controversial set of nine Renaissance sculptures, owned for decades by a Canadian family and now held by a Vancouver museum, will finally be sold this month at a major auction in New York — not as multimillion-dollar models made by Michelangelo, as the pieces were long thought to be, but as imitative artworks created during the Italian master’s lifetime by a notable Dutch follower.

New York City shut down its mass transit system, closed its schools and ordered hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes Sunday in the face of dire predictions about Hurricane Sandy, the superstorm bearing down on the East Coast.

New York City shut down its mass transit system, closed its schools and ordered hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes Sunday in the face of dire predictions about Hurricane Sandy, the superstorm bearing down on the East Coast.

Hurricane Sandy, the rare superstorm gathering in the eastern U.S., will afflict a third of the country with sheets of rain, high winds and heavy snow, say officials who warned millions in coastal areas to get out of the way.

Hurricane Sandy, the rare superstorm gathering in the eastern U.S., will afflict a third of the country with sheets of rain, high winds and heavy snow, say officials who warned millions in coastal areas to get out of the way.

It’s all about James Bond it seems as we get set for the release Skyfall, the latest in the spy-movie franchise that stretches back 50 years. Well, we are all about cars, so we assigned classic car spy Nigel Matthews to investigate what happened to some of the Bond movie cars from the past.

Many early European explorers cashed in on their voyages at sea by publishing books about their discoveries. Among them was Captain George Vancouver, who recounted his adventures in A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World in 1798.

Many early European explorers cashed in on their voyages at sea by publishing books about their discoveries. Among them was Captain George Vancouver, who recounted his adventures in A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World in 1798. Unfortunately for Vancouver, he had caught an unknown illness during his years at sea, and died before it was published. It didn’t exactly set the sales charts afire, either. Antiquarian book dealer Eric Waschke thinks only about 750 copies of the first edition of the three-volume set were published, along with 500 copies of an accompanying atlas.

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